Thanhha Lai is a well-poised Vietnamese author who wrote her debut novel, Inside Out and Back Again. She won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was Newbery Honor Recipient. Along with her debut novel, her next novel, Listen, Slowly, also sought praise by New York Times as bestseller and New York Times Book Review. Lai’s newest young adult novel, Butterfly Yellow, pieces together a heart-felt story about an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese refugee girl, Hằng

A Vietnamese American poet, Ocean Vương’s phenomenal achievement of winning the Forward prize, Whiting award, and the Thom Gunn award, including his recent accomplishment TS Eliot prize from his work Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has brought tremendous praise and attention from local and global audiences. He composes his collection of poems by stringing along heavy symbolic imagery of color, the body, nature, and violence to connect and convey the themes of family, love, memory

Thi Bùi’s graphic novel, The Best We Could Do, offers an illustrative perspective that reflects on the gap between first and second generations of Vietnamese Americans. Bùi questions the distance that she has with her parents in which her reflections delve into the traumatic history of war and escaping Vietnam as refugees. Through the process of understanding ancestry, Bùi breaks down the barriers she has with her parents and herself. She begins to see why her parents are the

Reading multicultural children’s literature, whether in teaching to curriculum or reading at home, allows for a progressive approach for a child’s learning development by exploring the importance of diversity. Integrating elements of bilingual education through a constructive environment, develops the foundation for building on a child’s curiosity and imagination as skills to use for gathering new understandings about belief, culture, language, tradition, and values. We ident

This week, my Facebook is streaming with #metoos, a hashtag movement that sprang up in light of allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. In parallel, women of the California State Legislature are stepping up to say #wesaidenough to the sexual harassment faced by females in government and politics. I’m so moved to see women post the painful details of their experiences and equally so to simply witness the sheer num

With intense and raw emotions, Lily Hoang transforms her work, A Bestiary, through the contemporary form of writing, using non-fictional experiences and fairy tales. The revival of fairy tales and myths adds to the multitude of diverse perspectives, which challenges the reader’s insight and understanding of the female gender role and Asian identity. Hoang is not afraid to make herself vulnerable in which she skillfully connects to the reader, revealing the anxieties of the se